The production of animated movies, advertisements, and other videos has been transformed in recent years by improvements in technology. For example, Pixar has revolutionized the production of animated videos and movies such as the technology utilized in the movie “Toy Story”. Since then the use of related technologies has proliferated to numerous animation production studios. One challenge, however, is the very high cost in producing quality animations as will be described below.
An exemplary first process in animation is described FIG. 1 for creating an “asset”. An asset is a virtual animated model or character. An exemplary process for producing an asset can be described as three sub-processes including “modeling” (steps 2, 4, 6), “texturing” (steps 8, 10), and “rigging” (steps 12, 14, 16). Within each of these sub-processes are individual steps as described briefly. The process depicted in FIG. 1 may be a computer-based process whose software may be stored on a media.
According to step 2, an artist conceives concept art. Based on the concept art, a three dimensional computer model is created according to steps 4 and 6. According to steps 8 and 10, the model is textured—an apparent surface finish or surface type (e.g., fur, glass, porous rock, etc.) is provided to the model. According to steps 12 and 14, “rigging” takes place. Rigging is the step of preparing the model for animation and has been described as placing the “bones” into the animated model. More specifically rigging defines which portions of the model are rigid or flexible and which are points or axes of relative rotation of portions of the model with respect to each other. Once rigging is complete, the asset is “published” according to step 16 whereby it is stored on a computer media for use in the production of an animation. The asset according to the exemplary embodiment of FIG. 2 is therefore a computer defined character that includes a three dimensional shape, a texture, and points and/or axes of relative rotation of portions of the three dimensional shape with respect to each other. Other assets can be created that utilize a subset of the processes of FIG. 2 such as an asset is not to be animated such as a fixed background. In that case the asset may not include axes of relative rotation and hence the rigging sub-process would not be necessary. Thus in general an asset may include one or more of shape, texture, points of rotation, or axes of rotation.
Once an asset is published, a set of four major sub-processes is utilized in the conventional process of generating an animated sequence of images using the asset. These include (1) animation, (2) lighting, (3) rendering, and (4) compositing.
Animation is the sub-process of creating a set of keyframes that define the animation. The animator starts with the assets and creates a set layout. Then the animator generates a full set of keyframes based upon the needs of the particular scene. The endpoint of this process is a stored set of keyframes that define the location and movement of the assets.
The second sub-process is lighting in which lighting parameters are adjusted per shot. As a note, a “shot” may include a number of keyframes and is associated with a particular scene in a movie (or other animation). The lighting parameters include lighting type, light position, light color, intensity, shadow softness, rendering quality, and other factors. This is a very labor-intensive, expensive, and time-consuming process in which a large department of lighters may consume more than 100,000 man-hours for a full-length movie.
After lighting is complete the full sequence of frames is rendered. This is very computationally intensive for a movie and, despite improved central processing unit (“CPU”) speeds, typically requires a bank of very powerful computers and considerable computation time. The rendered frames are then provided to the compositor who may combine rendered images and make minor adjustments before storing the final product—a fully rendered animated sequence of frames such as a full length movie, commercial, or other video.
As indicated earlier, a very lengthy and costly part of this process is the lighting sub-process. If after lighting the compositor finds that significant changes need to be made in lighting or animation, much of this costly process may need to be repeated, greatly increasing the cost and introducing a significant delay in the overall process. Additionally the lighting process tends to separate the roles of animator and compositor which may impact the quality and creativity of the end product. Therefore there is a need to improve upon this overall process.